Friday 18 February 2005, 14.00–18.30

It is impossible to separate the art of Joseph Beuys from his teaching, just as it is difficult to separate his life from his art or his art from his politics. Beuys was an influential teacher in the traditional sense, at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art; he extended his pedagogical role by creating many open forums for debate, and also used the rhetoric of teaching in performances such as How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare. This symposium explores how teaching was as much a medium of Beuys's art as drawing or sculpture.

Tate Modern  East Room
£10 (£8 concessions), booking recommended

  

Speakers:

For more than forty years – through the work of his gallery and now through the Demarco European Art Foundation – Richard Demarco has been a central force in the international art world, bringing experimental artists and thinkers together. Demarco worked closely with Joseph Beuys on many occasions including, in 1980, a manifestation of Beuys’s concept of the Free International University and the project Jimmy Boyle Days.

Mia Lerm Hayes is Lecturer at the University of Ulster, author of works on the connections between Beuys and James Joyce, the curator Joyce in Art and author of a book of the same title. She will discuss how the pedagogical dimension of Beuys’s practice can be found not just in the so-called ‘didactic’ works but also in the more aesthetic (or what Beuys called ‘ultra-visible’) works.

James Marriott and Jane Trowell are co-directors of PLATFORM which – deeply inspired by Joseph Beuys – has established itself as one of Europe’s leading exponents of ‘social sculpture’, combining the talents of artists, social scientists, activists and environmentalists to work across disciplines on issues of social and environmental justice.

Kenneth McMullen is an artist and professor at the London College of Communications. From studying film at the Slade School of Art in the early 1970s, McMullen moved to Düsseldorf during the high-point of Beuys’s open access teaching at the Academy, and proceeded to make films in collaboration with Beuys of teachings and other actions; some of these are included in the Tate Modern show.

Sean Rainbird is Curator of Contemporary Art at Tate and a specialist in twentieth-century German art. He has curated Joseph Beuys: Actions, Vitrines, Environments for Tate Modern.

Caroline Tisdall is a writer, curator and filmmaker. She was a close collaborator of Joseph Beuys and curator of the seminal retrospective of his work held at the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1979.  She is the author of Joseph Beuys: We Go This Way (1998).

This event is related to the Joseph Beuys: Actions, Vitrines, Environments exhibition